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Tax Strike Tactics

Maintain Solidarity in the Face of Divisive Pressure

Many tax resistance campaigns confront the challenge of divisions in the movement. Sometimes such divisions spring from deliberate divide-and-conquer tactics by those who oppose the campaign. Other times they are simply fractures in an unstable coalition.

If a campaign can maintain and demonstrate solidarity in the face of such challenges, this can help it to recruit and retain resisters.

Example German Democrats

In mid-19th century Germany, the aristocracy tried to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate the government’s enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who promoted tax resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic and counseled people to disregard it:

The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.

Example Bardoli Tax Strike

During the Bardoli tax strike, the government tried to exploit a variety of possible divisive wedges: Some villages in the district were relatively unharmed by recent tax increases, while others bore the brunt. Ethnicity, religion, occupation, and caste were other possible dividing lines. The government at times insisted that “outside agitators” were coming in from the nationalist movement to usurp the local struggle for their own ends.

There was also a potential divide between land-owners and the peasants who rented and worked the land:

The two sections of apparently conflicting interests were those who tilled the land and those who let it out. The latter had great stakes, and unless they stood by the petty tenants, the struggle would fizzle out.

Strike commander Vallabhbhai Patel visited these landlords and tried to convince them to maintain solidarity. He told them that the government was blaming the recent tax hikes on the landlords’ rent increases which, by the government’s reasoning, demonstrated that the land had become more valuable and that a higher tax was justified:

The sole ground on which the assessment has been enhanced is the rise in the rental value of land, and whether that rise is real or unreal, you are responsible for it. It is for your sins that the whole taluka [district] is suffering, and the least penance that you owe to them is to stand by them. Will you be loyal to the sarkar [government] or to the tillers of the soil? What is it that binds you to the sarkar? Payment of taxation. But what binds you to the peasants is a living bond. It is their toil on which you live and carry on your trade. If they are ruined, where will you be? Do not be false to your mainstay.

Example The Rebecca Riots

The Rebecca movement was very successful in its bold campaign, but it was weakened by tactics that alienated potential supporters.

In the Rebecca Riots, bands of disguised people, who followed leaders to whom they gave the pseudonym “Rebecca,” gathered in the dead of night to destroy toll booths across Wales.

The diffuse, non-hierarchical, anonymous structure of the movement made it vulnerable to people who wanted to hijack it for their own ends. People and groups calling themselves “Rebecca” began issuing threats and enacting vigilante justice in a variety of causes, or sometimes in what seemed like merely personal grievances.

For example, after Rebecca came to the aid of farmers by reducing the tolls they were charged when bringing their goods to market, another meeting of Rebeccaites decided they were therefore justified in demanding that these newly-liberated farmers and merchants lower the prices of their goods. Butter and beer would now be cheaper in Wales, and the Rebeccaites would see to it—by force if necessary.

Things like this made the message of the movement confused, made it less sympathetic to potential supporters, and helped the authorities to recruit spies and people willing to testify against the rioters from among those who otherwise might have been their allies.

Example The British Women’s Suffrage Movement

When the Women’s Tax Resistance League and allied organizations were trying to win the vote for women, most men couldn’t vote either. The right to vote was largely restricted to propertied men, though there were ongoing campaigns for universal male suffrage that hoped to change this.

Much of the women’s movement at the time was trying to get women to be treated equally as voters under the law. It was, therefore, fighting merely for the voting rights of propertied women, not for women in general.

Movement activist Dora Montefiore reflected on this, and the divisions it threatened to provoke:

…the Members of the Social Democratic Federation, of which I was a member, were very scornful because they said we should have been asking at that moment for Adult Suffrage and not Votes for Women; but although I have always been a staunch adult suffragist, I felt that at that moment the question of the enfranchisement of women was paramount, as we had to educate the public in our demands and in the reasons for our demands, and as we found that with many people the words “Adult Suffrage” connoted only manhood suffrage, our urgent duty was at that moment to gain Press publicity up and down the country and to popularise the idea of the political enfranchisement of women.

I explained in all my speeches and writings that though it looked as if I were only asking for Suffrage for Women on a property qualification, I was doing this because the mass of non-qualified women could not demonstrate in the same way, and I was to that extent their spokeswoman.… The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house and understood this point and never swerved in their allegiance to our organisation.

Example Poll Tax Resistance

In the campaign against Thatcher’s poll tax there were frequently tensions between the locally-organized grassroots groups that were the real engine of the revolt and the professional left/labor radical groups and politicians who kept trying to put themselves at the front of the parade.

When a number of people were arrested during an anti-poll tax demonstration at Trafalgar Square, some of these opportunists in the movement leadership distanced themselves from those who had been arrested. They wanted to distinguish nonviolent tax resisters from people who were charged with resisting arrest or other such charges. They even went so far as to talk about holding “an internal inquiry” to “root out the troublemakers.”

But when the defendants in these cases organized their own collective defense committee, the leaders of the All-Britain Federation tried to appropriate their momentum by launching its own rival defense fund and soliciting donations (they failed).

Example Left-Right Coalitions

There have been some attempts at coalition building between tax-sensitive activists on the left and right in the United States (where the folks at the top keep the folks at the bottom facing off against each other across the left-right divide so their pockets face outwards and are easier to pick).

The National Taxpayers Union held a “tea party” in 1970 at which right-leaning libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess, and leftish war tax resisters like Bradford Lyttle spoke. The following year, leftist scholar and war tax resister Noam Chomsky and conservative publisher Robert Kephart shared the stage at a National Taxpayers Union event.

The powerful 21st century Bonnets Rouges movement in France was a tax revolt that was nurtured by an alliance of business and entrepreneurial groups with a deregulation/low-tax agenda united with leftish Breton nationalists and decentralization activists.

Notes and Citations